This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Walter Buczynski was all of 9 years old when he walked past a cigar store, saw a toy piano in the window and said to his much older brother, “Look at that.”

Weeks later, a full-sized upright turned up at the Buczynskis’ modest rented house on Cameron St. in Toronto and a career was born.

Not that either brother No. 7 nor John, the 22-years-older brother No. 1, who had bought the instrument for Walter, quite realized what had just happened.

Walter was actually more interested in sports than music at the time, but he succumbed to John’s nudging to take lessons and by the age of 13 was working with one of Toronto’s leading teachers, Earle Moss. Three years later he already had his Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Toronto diploma.

Now a bespectacled octogenarian, he is the subject of “Walter Buczynski at 80,” a free concert celebrating his birthday, to be presented Sunday at 2:30 p.m. in Walter Hall at the University of Toronto, where he taught for 30 years (1969-99) before retiring as a professor emeritus.

Together with fellow pianists William Aide and Peter Longworth, accordionist Joseph Macerollo, violinist Mark Fewer, the Talisker String Quartet and a number of other artists, he will himself take part in the program.

But it is not as a pianist that he is being celebrated, although he was good enough to play Chopin’s F minor Concerto with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and compete in the prestigious International Chopin Competition in Warsaw.

No, for most of his long life, Buczynski has been known primarily as a prolific composer, whose list of works extends from chamber operas for children to orchestral, chamber and keyboard pieces.

Although he studied composition in Toronto with Godfrey Ridout and with Darius Milhaud in Aspen, it wasn’t until he went to Paris on Canada Council grants in 1960 and 1962 to work with the near-legendary Nadia Boulanger that he fully recognized his true vocation.

“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” he recalled earlier this week in the comfort of his Steinway-graced living room. “Nadia Boulanger was already 75, but she was extremely tough.

“She said, ‘If you are moving (in your piece) from C to C-sharp, you had better be prepared to defend the move with your life.’ It wasn’t enough for her for you to say, ‘It’s because I feel it.’ She wanted your brain to work. That approach has guided me all my life.

“She also taught me to teach myself, to strive to have my own idiom. I started to play with intervals I liked. I had no models whatsoever.”

Returning to Toronto from “the Boulangerie,” as the famed pedagogue’s studio was irreverently known, the young pianist-composer taught piano and theory at the Royal Conservatory for several years before moving over to the University of Toronto, where he added composition to his academic schedule.

Teaching and composition eventually curtailed his activities as a performer (“Every time I had to write a piece I stopped practising”) but he apparently didn’t regret the loss. Since retiring from the university he has even begun to practise again. He plans to play his Twenty-four Preludes at the Arts and Letters Club on March 17 and take part in another birthday concert as part of the Syrinx Concert Series at Heliconian Hall on April 13.

What he does regret is the loss of the CBC as an advocate for Canadian music, his own as well as that of other composers. “It was the CBC, through its commissions and performances, that really established the presence of the composer in our musical life,” he insists. “I don’t listen to the radio anymore. The golden age has passed.”

So what of the current state of the composer? “I knew from the age of 18 that I wasn’t going to make much money in the music business. I went into it for the music itself. But the situation could be better if we had more support from teachers and performers.

“We are lucky in Canada. We have a country full of virtuoso performers. But how many of them play Canadian music? How many of them are taught Canadian music? String teachers are the worst.”

Reason to give up? Not for brother No. 7. Having just finished his Eleventh Piano Sonata, his objective is still the same, to write a good piece.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com